U.S. President Barack Obama will travel to Florida's Everglades Wednesday hoping to reframe the debate on climate change ahead of a vital few months that will shape his environmental legacy.

On "Earth Day" Obama will swap Washington's turbid political waters for gator-infested wetlands, in the hope of putting America's cherished national parks -- and their economic impact -- front-and-center of a bitter partisan debate.

Japan plans to launch an unmanned mission to the moon as a stepping stone to a future visit to Mars, officials and local media said Monday.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) unveiled the plan for a moon lander to a council of the cabinet office and the ministry of education, culture, sports science and technology, a JAXA official said.

Cuba's efforts to sustain the critically endangered Cuban crocodile are getting a boost from Sweden, home to a pair of reptiles that Fidel Castro gave to a Soviet cosmonaut four decades ago.

A Stockholm zoo on Sunday is sending 10 of the couple's children to Cuba, where they will be placed in quarantine and eventually released into the Zapata Swamp, said Jonas Wahlstrom, the zookeeper who raised them.

California almonds are becoming one of the world's favorite snacks and creating a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for agricultural investors. But the crop extracts a staggering price from the land, consuming more water than all the showering, dish-washing and other indoor household water use of California's 39 million people.

As California enters its fourth year of drought and imposes the first mandatory statewide water cutbacks on cities and towns, the $6.5 billion almond crop is helping drive a sharp debate about water use, agricultural interests and how both affect the state's giant economy.

Five years after the worst U.S. offshore oil spill, the industry is working on drilling even further into the risky depths beneath the Gulf of Mexico to tap massive deposits once thought unreachable.

But critics say energy companies haven't developed the corresponding safety measures to prevent another disaster or contain one if it happens — a sign, environmentalists say, that the lessons of BP's spill were short-lived.

U.S. President Barack Obama said Saturday that climate change poses the world's biggest single threat.

"Today, there's no greater threat to our planet than climate change," Obama said in his weekly address, which had an environmental theme to mark Earth Day on April 22.

A method for detecting toxins through the reactions of fish embryos has won Chinese company Vitargent International a top prize for inventions, organizers said Friday.

The Grand Prix at the International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva went to Vitargent, from Hong Kong, for the natural method of finding toxins.

Canada revised its greenhouse gas emission data from 1990 to 2013 in a report Friday, showing it had higher carbon dioxide discharges each year, and a doubling of emissions from its oil sands.

All previous years were revised upward by around 12 to 24 megatons, which left total emissions up by 18 percent since 1990, according to the national report made under new reporting guidelines of a UN climate change agreement.

Way back in 1999, before he became China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao warned that water scarcity posed one of the greatest threats to the "survival of the nation".

Sixteen years later, that threat looms ever larger, casting a forbidding shadow over China's energy and food security and demanding urgent solutions with significant regional, and even global, consequences.

SpaceX's unmanned Dragon cargo ship arrived Friday at the International Space Station, carrying a load of food and supplies for the astronauts living in orbit.

European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti grappled the capsule with the space station's robotic arm at 6:55 am (1055 GMT) as the space station flew over the northern Pacific to the east of Japan, NASA said.